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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in climate change

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Do Changes in Our Climate Mean More Hurricanes? | National Geographic  Society

 

Wildfires. Drought. Floods. Violent storms.

For pagans, climate change is a religious problem.

It means that the gods are angry.

 

What do you do when you wrong someone?

You apologize.

You make restitution.

You don't do it again.

 

Climate change is a man-made problem. We have wronged the gods.

 

Paganism Lite usually shies from the language of sin, confession, and atonement.

The ancestors, though, did not fear this language. It was, in fact, part of their religious technology for righting wrongs, wrongs done to the gods.

 

What do you do when you wrong the gods?

You confess.

You offer sacrifices of atonement.

You don't do it again.

Paganism Lite won't get us through the current state of imbalance, through this War of the Elements.

In our day, as the ancestors did, so let us do also.

 

The ancestors also acknowledged, though, that prayers and sacrifices are worthless without underlying change of behavior. Call it repentance, if you will.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Fortunately, we're not alone in our endeavor. Who is god of carbon sequestration? Witches call him the Green Man.
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I looked around my yard this year and decided I needed more fruit and nut trees. This year I have bought and planted a Peach tree

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Lose the Chocolate

Ostara's the time when many would say: Loose the chocolate.

But me, I say: Lose the chocolate.

For religious reasons, lose it.

***

I live in Minnesota. It is wrong—wrong—that, in the stores here, apples should be expensive, and bananas cheap.

Wrong.

 ***

Chocolate, like copal and bananas, is an exotic visitor from the fabled Southern lands of Ever-Summer. There's the connection with Ostara: think of it as sympathetic magic.

In a few years, most of the world's cacao trees, grown unsustainably in inappropriate places where—as a cash crop—their cultivation has helped to destroy sustainable local agriculture, will be dead from cacao blight, anyway.

By then, of course, oil will be running out in good earnest, and it will no longer be economically feasible to move foodstuffs over large distances.

Then chocolate will once again become the expensive exotic that, by rights, it ought to be.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Birch beer is an old northern drink. I once split a bottle of it with a friend while standing under the tower on Glastonbury Tor i
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I remember back in the 80's they kept trying to pass off carob as chocolate. It never tasted right to me. Then back in the 00's

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Life Without Air

Ninety percent of American homes are air-conditioned.

Ninety percent.

Talk about carbon footprint.

That's why, for pagans, air-conditioning is a religious issue.

That's why—at least for now—I plan to remain one of the ten percent.

I live in a big old brick house in Minnesota, where it's too cold during the winter and too hot during the summer. Usually we're pretty comfortable until the bricks heat up around Old Midsummer's/Fourth of July. Then it can get pretty hot.

Fortunately, my friend Craig comes from Dallas, and is just old enough to remember life BA (Before Air). Here's what he recommends.

Last modified on

Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs
Celebrating the sun

In other years I’ve been sunburned at Beltain. I’ve been overwhelmed by the heat and had to hide in the shade of the trees. I’ve had to worry about not de-hydrating during rituals. It’s a festival whose traditions include young couples going off into the woods at night.

I’m writing this blog post while wearing a winter jumper, the windows are shut because it’s too cold to have them open. Right now, there is sun outside, but most of the day has been cold and wet. May the first was cold and wet, at the end of a cold, late spring and a winter that seemed to go on forever. It’s years like this when you can start to see why our ancestors might have felt the need to do dramatic things to persuade the sun to come back.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Radical Hope

Last night I read the news about Cape Town, and then dreamed that my garden died.

I live in a condo in Los Angeles, so my garden is small and fragile and mostly in containers: calendula and tulsi and borage and lemon balm in pots and window boxes, selfheal that's dying no matter what I do, jasmine and passionvine that twine around each other in bombastic friendship, nasturtiums that cascade in a curtain of friendly little circles. Baby blue eyes and violet seedlings growing in a flat. Cleveland sage in a pot, since the soil is mostly clay, and sagebrush and California fuschia in the ground, since they can tolerate that clay. I had to fight with my building manager to put plants in the bare dirt behind the building, even though I'm on the HOA board; status quo bias is so strong that people trust ugly cracked ground more than they trust small, quiet plants. (I won the rest of the board over partly by telling them my unit's property values are suffering because of the eyesore that is the dirt. In reality I don't care much about the property values, but a witch uses the tools in her toolbox; she shapeshifts when she needs to.)

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
When the Wights Are Angry

Hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, floods.

I'm not really saying that Republicans are responsible.

Not really.

We would say: climate change.

Traditional societies would say: the wights are angry.

(Wights: literally, “beings”: also, elves, fairies, huldrefolk, land-"spirits", etc.)

Two ways, perhaps, of describing the same thing.

Why are the wights angry?

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    I would say that the wights are the "interiority" of things. They're those Other People that inhabit the Land, that go by many nam
  • Tasha Halpert
    Tasha Halpert says #
    What is the definition of a Wight?
  • Mariah Sheehy
    Mariah Sheehy says #
    A couple years ago at the Irish Fair, I talked with Daithi Sproule, a traditional Irish musician who was retelling the old tales.
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    I thoroughly agree; they seem to me like two different ways of observing the same phenomenon: one from without, one from within.
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I remember reading an article on Shamanism.org about the author's encounter with an angry cloud being. It seems the cloud being w

Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs

Eclipses are said to be a closing of one door and an opening of a window. At this past full moon on 6th September I did some Tarot queries using Joanna Colbert Powell's Gaian Tarot. The results were a bit counter-intuitive. A full moon is a culmination, but all the cards were pointing to beginnings and letting go so the new could happen. So eclipse season ain't over yet. Nope! The weather happening globally is the narrative set by the eclipse.

Fire and water are duking it out all over the USA. Here in Ireland, after a relatively dry (for us) winter, spring and summer, Lunasadh has brought the monsoon season upon us. In our boggy, heavy clay laden west of Ireland the water tends to pool. There is only so much land can hold and then it just lies on top. In winter we have these naturally occurring lakes called turloughs that evaporate in summer. Well, the turloughs are arriving early! And our car engine was killed when some local flooding on our lane turned out to be deeper than estimated.

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